I had a bunch of fun working with the new iMovie 2008 over the weekend. It really is super easy to use and can make a corny home video look great. The only thing I don’t love about it compared to iMovie 2007 is that there is no feature that will allow you to slow down or speed up the movie.

Here I am doing a How To video on how to make a cappuccino at home without an expensive machine. Enjoy!

I have uploaded quite a few copies of WordPress 2.5 for clients now, and I have had no problems with it at all…until my last upload. This copy was for my friends Dana and Jamie so they can have a WordPress blog about The Adventures of Keegan Tosh Kelly (and family). The problem didn’t occur during the installation, the problem occurred when submitting comments. The 2.5 version of WordPress was showing a 404 Page error after I would (and everyone else) would hit the submit button. It also seemed like it was getting all hung up for a while, thinking of where to redirect the user before returning the 404 page. The weird thing about it though, it was still sending the comment moderation emails to the admin’s email account.

I thought for sure that this must have been a bug with WordPress 2.5 because I hadn’t hacked anything and I was using a very basic theme. I started Googling terms that might help me find a forum or another blog posting similar errors, but there wasn’t much indexed since this most recent version of WordPress just came out a few weeks ago.

When Summer and I transferred our www.ca2pr.com wordpress blog to our new server, we were getting 404 pages also. Summer figured out that because we were using the mod_rewrite option for Search Engine Friendly URL’s, we may have to reset that option (turn off and back on again) so that the new server would now how to handle URL requests….and TA DAAA! It worked.

I wasn’t having the same problem here, but it did have something to do with the URL (404 error) so I decided to head on over to the Settings button on the right hand side of the WordPress Admin screen. That is when I saw my mistake that caused the 404 error when posting comments. I screwed up the Custom URL structure.

You see, I like to skip the category in the URL structure, and go right for the post title. So, to achieve this, I add a “Custom Structure” to my settings page like so:

My mistake was leaving a space after the last % and before the /. I took out the space (as shown above), republished the blog and now it is no longer returning a 404. I was misdiagnosed the problem from the start; the comment button was working just fine, the Thank You Page was not found. I am glad I didn’t start hacking up the core files trying to fix it. :-)

Yesterday was an extremely productive day for me. Although, I worked close to 14 hours, I accomplished more things yesterday with my new Puerto Rican business than I have in the past two weeks.

Yesterday, I successfully uploaded an opensource content management system on my new corporate website, uploaded a “Client Relationship Management” software and imported all of my current client data and uploaded vBulletin. I set up all of the proper databases on the server, transferred my old vBulletin database to my new server and successfully connected to all the old data on the new server.

It really does feel good to get all of that stuff done. Not just because it is behind me, but because knowing how these things work and having the ability to do them (quasi-efficiently) is very empowering for me. After all, I work on the web for a living, and up until this point, I have always paid employees or 1099 contractors to do these things for me.

Database Creation and Transfer completion list:

New Database created for Joomla (User created and granted permissions)

New Database created for SugarCRM (User created and granted permissions)

Successful Import of old Database to new server for vBulletin ((User created and granted permissions))

This morning, after using open source software WordPress for a client, I decided it was time to transfer my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress. There were tons of tutorials online that explained how to make the transfer over to the open source content management system, but none of them seemed to work!

I know just enough coding to know that I could be dangerous if I were let loose on files that were not backed up. I found about 8 tutorials on the first page of Google when I searched exporting Blogger to WordPress, but they all required me to change settings on my server, then the Blogger settings interface and included multiple warnings to back up my site. Shhhhhh…I thought this was going to be much easier.

After setting up wordpress on a new domain, I simply went to the “Settings” tab in the new WordPress 2.5 interface and clicked on “Import” and chose “Blogger” from the menu. I have three blogs with Blogger, but I only wanted to import the posts from one of them. After I authorized Google for my new URL to access the posts, I was sent back to another user interface page with listed the amount of posts and comments it could import for each of my blogs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t showing anything for this blog (about 165 posts and 300 comments).

After tons of searching around, head banging and kicking the dog (no animals were truly harmed during the transfer of my Blogger to Word Press) with no luck, I decided to try one more thing.

The only Blogger site that WordPress was able to import, was the only site I have hosted with blogspot. With that knowledge, I decided to open a blogspot account (I created a domain.blogspot URL and chose to keep it private so the search engine spiders wouldn’t crawl it) so I could try to import from there. It seemed a bit dodgy though, because I then had to go to my blog and go to the “Publishing Tab” and changed my settings. I changed my settings from my custom domain to Blog*Spot Address. I then saved my settings in Blogger.

I then went back to my new WordPress admin panel, clicked on “Manage”, then “Import”, then Authorize (when I was prompted by Google whether or not to Authorize my new domain to the data) and within seconds, it showed all of the posts in the admin section of two out of my three blogs. Both of the ones that were showing posts were hosted at blogspot.com.

From there, you simply hit the Import button next to your desired blog and like magic, your Blogger account has been imported into your WordPress 2.5 account!

I have tried uploading a video to youtube 3 times now. Each time I enter the title, description and tags and hit upload after going to the right file in my directories. It takes about 20 minutes until it goes back to step one (where i am supposed to enter the title, description and tags). There is no You Tube error message or anything…just kinda bumped back to the end of the line to start over.

I am too aggravated to deal. Maybe I’ll learn how to upload videos to my blog without You Tube.